As part of my account cleanup and general retrenchment, I finally canceled my feedly subscription and moved the RSS feeds I follow into Unread, which provides its own syncing back end across Mac, iOS, and iPadOS. Great.

In the process of canceling my feedly subscription it reminded me I have over 30 feed filters enabled. Hm.

Oh, right: The Oregonian, my hometown paper. I pay for a subscription. The website itself borders on unusable, and the RSS feed is a nightmare. There’s only one. At some point they had feeds by section—there’s evidence of that in their outdated help documentation—but no more. You just get everything:

• Astrology
• All the advice columns (not sure how many, maybe four or five?)
• “Most expensive house in Lake Oswego this week”
• Online sports book promotions

… plus the actual news news, but good luck finding the kernels of corn in the pile.

And if you do manage to spot a news article you’d like to read, their paywall has the memory of a goldfish and godawful session handling: You’ll land on your story, get directed to the paywall, go through the login, then get kicked out to somewhere besides the story. It’s really, really bad.

I wrote the paper’s editor about this a while back, before she retired. As you might expect, the online publishing division doesn’t answer to the editorial division, and there was also the same “that stuff gets views” rationale I remember from my online media days, when we thought “views” was the prime metric.

Last month as I was cleaning up subscriptions Apple informed me I could get News+ added to my existing Apple bundle and end up paying less per month than without it, so I went along. The Oregonian is one of the publications in the News+ package, so I follow it (where they still dump a lot of junk, but not quite as much). And if you just add Oregon and Portland as topical areas to follow, the Oregonian gets pulled in to that. So I just dropped the RSS feed from my local folder (but still have WWeek, because they don’t show up in Apple News).

Some people are, like, “drop that centrist rag already … the Mercury and Willy Week are all you really need.”

Honestly, kindly, gently: lol.

I’ll always read their coverage—media literacy is about understanding and balancing a diversity of inputs—but they’re just not enough, and their reporting can be weirdly incurious if they can’t find a salacious or spicy angle. The Oregonian has its own biases and general slant, but it provides more coverage, and more diverse coverage. It’s essential.

Anyhow, I am guessing the Oregonian gets a lot more money from my paid, direct subscription than they do whatever revenue sharing Apple gives them for a content license, but their website is atrocious, their RSS feeds are unusable, and their editorial staff is held hostage by a web team operating on 2008 rules.

I wish they’d get nonprofit status so I could just budget them under “charity.”